A frontline battle against troubling trends.
Doctors and health experts have long been sounding the alarm over the controversial hot health takes flooding TikTok and other social media platforms.
Now, nurses are being trained to fight back against the wellness trends and misinformation spreading across their patients’ feeds.
From “nature’s Ozempic” to sunscreen myths, health advice runs rampant under the “For You” tab, even when the science doesn’t always back up the claim.
And more people are turning to social media for answers: Fifty-five percent of adults said they use social media for health information, according to a 2025 Kaiser Family Foundation survey.
That’s prompting nurse practitioners to take matters into their own hands, training future nurses to critically evaluate viral health trends, help patients navigate the overwhelming amount of information online and guide them toward evidence-based care.
The Passan School of Nursing at Wilkes University is among the programs shifting its curriculum to address the changing information landscape, from undergraduate courses through Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) degrees, Meghan Pontz, a nurse practitioner and professor of practice at the Passan School of Nursing, told The Post.
The viral hot takes aren’t new territory for healthcare providers. Pontz conceded that many of them have excellent hooks and that social media is increasingly where patients get their information.
To meet patients where they are, students in one course are even assigned to make a short, TikTok-style video to discuss a disease process they’re comfortable treating.
But, the curriculum goes beyond making videos or responding to misleading content about trends such as mouth taping, which is among the trends that most concern Pontz.
Taking a new approach
Nurse practitioners are taking a more proactive approach, equipping their communities with correct information by also focusing on proactive health teaching.
“We’re looking at our curriculum to make sure that we’re weaving health literacy, media literacy and misinformation response directly into coursework, rather than having this as a sidebar conversation in clinical practice,” Pontz said.
The changes come as more and more patients arrive at doctors’ offices and clinics with complex health questions, many based on the algorithms showing content on their screens.
DNP professors are re-examining how patients interact with healthcare providers and how they can help patients distinguish between legitimate medical uncertainty and unsupported claims in a trending Instagram Reel.
They do this by implementing SIFT, a research method that encourages people to stop, investigate the source, find better or more reliable coverage and trace claims back to their origins.
Be careful with online doctors
Even advice doled out by medical professionals who have become TikTokers should be taken with a grain of salt.
“You should regard that [advice] with a level of caution and be able to verify what that TikTok or video is saying,” Pontz said, advising viewers to look for peer-reviewed research and established standards of care and practice.
Viewers can also check someone claiming to be a healthcare provider has a National Provider Identifier (NPI), a unique identifier required for US health care providers.
Pontz said providers discussing evidence-based medicine in short-form videos will also “provide resources or links to their information, typically in their bios or in the comments of the video.”
Both the NPI and additional sources can help social media users independently verify the information being conveyed to them.
Another red flag? Claims of a magic cure-all or silver-bullet solution.
“Nothing is a blanket statement in medicine,” Pontz added. “There is not a garlic diet that’s going to fix diabetes as the only health intervention.”
Viewers should also keep an eye out for whether content is sponsored, as there may be “financial incentives that can put something in a better light than it really is,” Pontz said.
The goal isn’t to tell patients to stop trusting social media, altogether. Instead, DNP professors are helping students and patients question what they’re seeing and determine whether the source deserves their trust.
